tor-relays July 2022

tor-relays@lists.torproject.org

20 participants
13 discussions

How to reduce tor CPU load on a single bridge?
by David Fifield 19 Dec '22

19 Dec '22

The main Snowflake bridge (https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/5481936581E23D2D178105D44DB6…) is starting to become overloaded, because of a recent substantial increase in users. I think the host has sufficient CPU and memory headroom, and pluggable transport process (that receies WebSocket connections and forwards them to tor) is scaling across multiple cores. But the tor process is constantly using 100% of one CPU core, and I suspect that the tor process has become a bottleneck. … [View More]Here are issues about a recent CPU upgrade on the bridge, and observations about the proportion of CPU used by different processes: https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowfl… https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowfl… I have the impression that tor cannot use more than one CPU core—is that correct? If so, what can be done to permit a bridge to scale beyond 1×100% CPU? We can fairly easily scale the Snowflake-specific components around the tor process, but ultimately, a tor client process expects to connect to a bridge having a certain fingerprint, and that is the part I don't know how to easily scale. * Surely it's not possible to run multiple instances of tor with the same fingerprint? Or is it? Does the answer change if all instances are on the same IP address? If the OR ports are never used? * OnionBalance does not help with this, correct? * Are there configuration options we could set to increase parallelism? * Is migrating to a host with better single-core performance the only immediate option for scaling the tor process? Separate from the topic of scaling a single bridge, here is a past issue with thoughts on scaling beyond one bridge. it looks as though there are not ways to do it that do not require changes to the way tor handles its Bridge lines. https://bugs.torproject.org/tpo/anti-censorship/pluggable-transports/snowfl… * Using multiple snowflake Bridge lines does not work well, despite that we could arrange to have the Snowflake proxy connect the user to the expected bridge, because tor will try to connect to all of them, not choose one at random. * Removing the fingerprint from the snowflake Bridge line in Tor Browser would permit the Snowflake proxies to round-robin clients over several bridges, but then the first hop would be unauthenticated (at the Tor layer). It would be nice if it were possible to specify a small set of permitted bridge fingerprints. [View Less]

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relayor v22.0.0-rc is released
by nusenu 03 Dec '22

03 Dec '22

Hi, relayor v22.0.0-rc is released. relayor is an ansible role that helps you with running tor relays with minimal effort (automate everything). https://github.com/nusenu/ansible-relayor#main-benefits-for-a-tor-relay-ope… Changes since relayor v21.2.0-rc: * MetricsPort support improvements: * generate nginx reverse server config for remote prometheus scraping on the relay (we do not install nginx) * generate htpasswd file for HTTP basic auth of MetricsPort on the relay * debian/… [View More]

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[New Initiative] Tor Weather: Improving the Tor Weather
by Sarthik Gupta 18 Aug '22

18 Aug '22

Hello everyone, As we all know, nodes are the building blocks of the tor-network. More often than not these nodes require some maintenance, which could be in the form of software upgrades, troubleshooting issues, rebooting the relays in case of failures, etc. As of today, if any relay disappears from the tor-network, no one will know. Tor-Weather aims at solving this by creating a notification service which relay operators can subscribe to in order to get various types of updates for their … [View More]

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Setting a bridge to automatically change IP adresses
by Keifer Bly 10 Aug '22

10 Aug '22

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When will relays disappear form tor metrics
by Anders Burmeister 01 Aug '22

01 Aug '22

Hi heroes Ended and deleted my two relays Aerodynamik02 and Aerodynamik03. When can I expect they will disappear from tor metrics?https://metrics.torproject.org/rs.html#details/EFEACD781604EB80FBC0… Best regards Anders

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Impact on running a tor relay on other internet services?
by Thoughts 28 Jul '22

28 Jul '22

Hi all - I've been running a TOR non-exit relay for several months now. Its rare, but I'm seeing what I believe is the occasional connection attack, with my relay complaining about the number of connections and suggesting I reduce capacity. Those are rare, and most of the time my server is running at about 20% CPU. During attacks, which seem unrelated to my Tor Upload/Download rate, CPU jumps to well over 100% (quad core, so 400% is max). I'd normally just ignore this, but it … [View More]

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relay memory leak?
by Fran 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hey, new non-exit relay, Debian 11, tor 0.4.7.8-1~d11.bullseye+1, ~ 1 week old (-> no guard) KVM VM with atm 4 cores, host passthrough AMD EPYC (-> AES HW accel.). As can be seen at the attached screenshots memory consumption is irritating as well as the quite high CPU load. All was fine when it had ~100 Mbit/s but then onion skins exploded (110 per second -> up to 4k per second) as well as CPU and memory. Tor complains: > Your computer is too slow to handle this many … [View More]

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Next Tor Relay operator meetup + MCH activities
by gus 26 Jul '22

26 Jul '22

Hi everyone, This month we won't have our monthly online check-in as many of us are traveling or on vacation mode. But, don't feel sad, we will have two activities this weekend! 1. (livestream): Modernizing the Tor Ecosystem for the Future, 2022-07-24, 15:00-15:50 with Alexander Færøy (ahf), Network Team Lead. Read more: https://program.mch2022.org/mch2021-2020/talk/MUP7MX/ 2. Relay Operator Meetup @ May Contain Hackers (MCH2022) ahf, Artikel10 and many others Tor contributors are at MCH … [View More]

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Tor bridges limit
by Me 25 Jul '22

25 Jul '22

Good day all. I am currently running two middle relays on my home network and was wondering if I can add any bridges to my existing set up. I am aware of the limit of two middle relays per ip address but do not see anything stating whether there was any such limit for bridges. I am also not clear on whether the bridges are recognized by the tor network in the same manner as Middle relays and whether the two unit limit applies to the total of devices connected. Thank you in advance for any … [View More]

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Relay Overloaded and Dropping Onionskins
by bidulock_ringrose＠aleeas.com 21 Jul '22

21 Jul '22

Greetings! I hope this is the right list to be asking this, if it is not please forgive me. I am purposefully omitting some identifying information for privacy sake. I run 2 non-exit relays both with an advertised bandwidth of around 8 MiB/s each. I have noticed that they have been overloaded a lot lately. These relays have been bottlenecked at the 3-4 MiB/s mark ever since I put them online. Upon further investigation, when I curled the MetricsPort according to https://support.… [View More]

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tor-relays July 2022